Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Miss-Understood Mrinalini Mukherjee: A Pedestrian Tribute

(Mrinalini Mukherjee 1949-2015)

Art critic, curator and writer, Girish Shahane was on the
stage. The occasion was the Parashar Memorial lecture 2014. The new wing
auditorium of the National Gallery of Modern Art was not in its full capacity. It
looked more like a family get together than a memorial lecture though the topic
of it was something very grave like ‘Plural Modernisms’. Girish was not in his
elements perhaps because of the disturbances caused by the incoming and
outgoing guests and the up and down running of family volunteers in their newly
bought stilettos. He struggled a bit to make a connect with the audience but
when he found that it was not happening, he went on with his talk which sounded
more like a monologue than a spirited presentation. Exactly on the fourth row
from the rear right entrance of the auditorium, at the aisle seat of the middle
row there, sat Mrinalini Mukherjee focusing her eyes sharply on the speaker. I
was at her right, in another aisle seat, taking a glance at her. She was like a
huge bird that did not give any damn to the bird watchers. She was famous and
respected but she did not carry that air around her. In fact she neglected most
of her admirers with due cynicism in her eyes that lit up only for her
exclusive crowd of friends that comprised of most of the ex-Baroda-ites. She
puffed out her silk clad queenly arrogance from the cigarettes that she chain
smoked. Elders gathered around her while the youngsters pretty much avoided
her.

I was watching Mrinalini Mukherjee on that day as I could
not follow Girish’s talk due to the constant opening and shutting of the door.
As you open and close the door the dust settled on the carpeted floor of the
auditorium gets disturbed. This had caused a few coughs from the audience.
Cough is like a yawn. It is infectious and soon I found many people coughing to
clear their throats. It was obviously not an indication of their boredom but
when you are at the podium, trying to hammer in some ideas about plural
modernism in the minds of the audience, a little cough or squeaking of chair
would kill your enthusiasm. Girish was struggling to cope up with the
situation. Mrinalini Mukherjee could not contain her coughing. At regular
intervals she was coughing and now we were expecting anxiously during the
silent intervals for her cough to start. I thought the cough was caused by the
dust. Obviously it was. But Mrinalini Mukherjee seemed a bit tired and the
chain smoking and over weight of the body seemed to have taken the toll. Taking
pity on her, a young girl who was working as a volunteer and obviously a family
member, almost resembling a fully decked Christmas tree, brought her a glass of
water and politely offered it to Mrinalini Mukherjee. She looked at the girl
tilting her head. There was a question in her eyes: Did I ask you to bring
water? Though not eloquent, the question was sharp and now the girl was in a
fix. Mrinalini Mukherjee was not ready to take any help from her. Finally she
gestured to keep down the glass on the floor, which the already crestfallen
girl immediately obeyed. Mrinalini Mukherjee did not touch that glass of water.

(A hemp sculpture by Mrinalini Mukherjee)

I saw the artistic arrogance in her and for some strange
reason I was feeling happy. Mrinalini Mukherjee was an artist who held her head
high, worked alone and lived alone. She did not want to receive pity or charity
from anybody. Actually, I do not have intimate experiences or memories to write
about her. When I came to Delhi in mid 1990s, I knew that there was one artist
named Mrinalini Mukherjee living in the city and she was the daughter of the
great master, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Leela Mukherjee. In one of those
days, when somebody introduced us to her in an exhibition opening, she gave us
a compassionate smile. That was all. Later on whenever she met me in the
exhibition openings she just nodded in recognition. Over a period of time that
nodding too was gone. Perhaps, Mrinalini Mukherjee never wanted art critics or
art historians. Even if she had wanted them I did not belong to that tribe of
art critics which she chose to work with. So I remained a common spectator than
a member of her inner circle. I do not remember when I had seen her first solo
exhibition, but I still do remember her works; the hemp works, which was a
novelty at that time. She was a sort of detached artist who did her works in
unconventional materials with a strange sense of eroticism.

Mrinalini Mukherjee belonged to that generation of women
artists who got somehow de-sexualized by the art historians, critics and their
contemporaries. In that sense, we could see that Nasreen Mohammedi, Rumanna
Husain, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Nilima Sheikh and to an extent Nalini Malani and
Navjot Altaf are not ‘gendered’ in their works. They were either ‘mother
figures’ or ‘dispassionate commentators of womanhood’. Their bodies or their
cultural bodies (as in their works) were not eroticised for critical reasons.
It is not necessary to en-gender a woman artist’s body to create a feminist or
feminine discourse around her body of works. But when their works of art are
also discussed from within the sanitized zones of asexualization, then we
should know that there is an agenda behind it. Amrita Sherghil and B.Prabha are
not talked about with the same verve. When Shergil is talked about her sexually
charged body was one of the markers to debate the aesthetic relevance of her
works. B.Prabha, on the other hand is treated almost like she was N.S.Bendre.
Similarly when we come to late 1970s and 1980s, these women artists are talked
about more like social commentators than commentators who could talk about
sexual parities, disparities or related gender issues. Nalini Malani in her
early works and in her later video works takes a feminist position sans erotic
connotations of the female body. Though sexuality is an undercurrent in all of
their works, when it comes to critical articulation, sexuality is almost
treated like a taboo.

(A Hemp sculpture by Mrinalini Mukherjee)

Feminist critics could contest my arguments. But the truth
is that even when we talk about Mrinalini Mukherjee’s works we end up in
talking about sexually charged imagery in her hemp works and it all ends there.
I do not know whether art critics or historians have written about her old and
new body of works in the context of feminist or feminine discourse. Whatever I
have gone through about her works generally talk about the tribal goddess,
mother goddess and primordial vulva images and so on. I have not seen much why
Mrinalini Mukherjee or in that sense Rumanna Hussain has articulated their own
sexualities against the sexual stereotyping of women of their times. Rumanna
Hussain is unfortunately got fixated as an artist who was primarily a Muslim,
therefore a secular artist and she was more affected by her illness and social
divides than her feminist or feminine position in the society. When people talk
about Navjot Altaf, she is passed off as another male artist or someone who
works in the line of Mona Hatoum without the daring aspect. If today Mrinalini
Mukherjee’s works are limited to the understanding of hemp material, new
bronzes, ceramics and hints at a strange sort of eroticism, the reasons for
this should be sought in where these artists were protected from being called
as feminist artists by historians. In India, critics seem to take permission
from the artist before they call them a feminist or chauvinist. My experience is
that most of the women artists I have worked with clearly tell me that they are
not feminists.

Somehow, you may find it critically fallacious when I use
feminism and femininity as critically interchangeable tropes. Feminism is not a
discourse of femininity and vice versa. However at the same time feminist
discourse cannot discount the defining feminine dimensions. While a discourse
on femininity in exclusion could get away from feminism, feminism in itself
cannot get away without addressing femininity. I have a feeling that Mrinalini
Mukherjee is less understood or misunderstood because of this critical
sanitization happened during the 1980s. I believe that the major critics and
historians of that time were mostly looking at the works of the male artists
and were making future provenances for them. Anyway, the new age art critics,
art historians and critics could take up this angle for further debate.

( a bronze sculpture by Mrinalini Mukherjee)

I did not have any close relationship with Mrinalini
Mukherjee. However I thought that I should write about her because I had seen
an invitation from the NGMA inviting me along with thousands of others to a
retrospective of her works. I was in another city so I could not attend the
opening. And yesterday (2nd February 2015), at night around eleven o
clock, I saw Sumeshwar Sharma of Clark House Initiative posting a condolence
message on the demise of Mrinalini Mukherjee. I thought it was a prank as it
came from Sharma who posts things that sounds prankish at times. I googled and
found nothing like that in any news channels. But by today morning, it was
confirmed. I remembered how she had expressed her wish to go for a long journey
with one of my friends; a sort of road trip to do sketch and draw. Now she has
gone to a different journey from where, they say there is no return. But who
knows. Artists live on in their works and Mrinalini Mukherjee was an artist.